PsychosisReview

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It's all in your head, man.

By Lucas M. Thomas

Demons have kidnapped your mind. Under their control, your thoughts, feelings and emotions are running wild, and all the while your body is slowly shutting down &#Array; you're soon to die. Not wanting to admit defeat and accept a fate of ceased existence, your subconscious self has imagined up a defender. Taking the shape of a kind of spaceship, the valiant brain and body protector now seeks to fly through five stages filled with your wayward thoughts and memories and eliminate the demon creatures lurking inside. It's Psychosis, and it's more than a little insane.

In premise, anyway. In gameplay this adventure is far more tame, tried and true &#Array; it's a side-scrolling shooter from the TurboGrafx-16, after all, and even the most casual of Virtual Console fans knows that there are already 37,000 other TurboGrafx shooters on sale in the Wii Shop. Psychosis, unfortunately, would be ranked somewhere around 36,000th place when you line them all up, though. Because it's not the worst shooter available, but it certainly is one of the least memorable.

The core gameplay mechanic employed here is pods. Two pods, working in tandem, that can be spun and rotated around your ship to cover your craft from the front, the rear, or either the top or bottom. Your standard ship has a forward-firing laser and it's possible to play through each of Psychosis' levels using only it, but you'd be in for a tough time taking that tack. It's best to employ the pods.

Your mesmerized mind is apparently filled with floating, multi-colored building blocks. Who knew?

The pods are summoned forth when you grab a floating power-up orb emblazoned with a letter on the side, and they serve as shields that guard you from enemy fire at first. Later on they can be upgraded further, adding their own laser-firing capabilities, getting charged with electricity, emitting waves of flame &#Array; it's pretty standard stuff, really, for anybody that's ever played any other side-scrolling shooter. And that's where Psychosis falls short. It doesn't really do anything truly new.

It can be moderately engaging to fire forward against enemies with your pods shielding your cockpit, then quickly spin them to cover your rear, then spin them again to shoot some other direction &#Array; but that's the beginning and end of anything interesting here. The stages are fanciful and wacky, but not extraordinary. The challenge is fair, but not epic. And the boss battles are all right, but still pretty run-of-the-mill.

So Psychosis is left looking for some other aspect to grab onto to establish its own identity, and it never really finds it. Even the premise of a demon possessing your mind and your subconscious fighting back by creating a spaceship loses steam after the initial set-up, as the stages are too arbitrary and incohesive to support the theme. Konami's Life Force did the "inside the body" theme better, as it sent your ship sailing through the innards of a gigantic intergalactic snake.

Psychosis

A downloadable version of the 1990 TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine game, provided through Nintendo's Virtual Console service.

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The Verdict

For 600 Wii Points, you could do worse than Psychosis. But this is ultimately just one more scrolling shooter from the TurboGrafx, and isn't memorable at all beyond its initial premise of plot. You'd be much better served to save those six bucks and put them toward one of the truly amazing Turbo shooters already available for download, like Gate of Thunder or Lords of Thunder. Or, for a game that more closely mimics the pod-focused gameplay mechanic of this title, try taking a look at the original R-Type.